In the course of their lives people attend a great variety of events; these events may be formal (for example, graduations or work events) or informal (for example, parties and social gatherings), large (for example, music festivals) or small (for example, dinner parties). The memories of such events can be preserved in the form of recorded media, and the proliferation of smartphones with cameras and other portable media-recording devices means that people can easily capture memories of events in a variety of forms of recorded media, including photographs and video.
People attending or organising an event may take a large number of photographs or videos using for example a smartphone, and may wish to share these photographs or videos with others. These photographs or videos may be collected in a social media “event page”. It may be desirable to group the photographs or videos based on the people captured in the photographs or videos, or to search for photographs or videos containing a particular person. To achieve this, the people captured in the photographs or videos must be identified and the photographs or videos must be tagged. The conventional methods for identifying people captured in photographs or videos involve facial recognition and manual tagging; this process is slow, and requires manual processing by a user. The process of identifying the people captured in photographs or videos of an event, which must be carried out before the photographs or videos can be grouped or searched, can therefore be laborious.
EP2225867 discloses a method of tagging photographs captured using a smartphone by employing a directional antenna located on the smartphone.